"Pestilence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the trees were neither plants nor moss. In the branches was never the song of a bird. The lower branches were dead. All the life of the place had fled upwards to meet the sun. Soon even the life overhead would be gone. Christophe passed into a part of the wood which was visited by some mysterious pestilence. A kind of long, delicate lichen, like spiders' webs, had fastened upon the branches of the red pines, and wrapped them about with its meshes, binding them from hand to foot, passing from tree to ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Buddha treads in journeying, there is not even one person in all the multitude of the villages who is not benefited. Then throughout the world there is peace and good will. The sun and the moon shine clear and bright. Wind and rain come only at a suitable time. Calamity and pestilence cease. The country prospers; the people are free from care. Weapons become useless. All men reverence religion, and regulate their conduct in all matters with earnestness ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side. No amount of calamity which merely befell a man, descending from the clouds like lightning, or stealing from the darkness like pestilence, could alone provide the substance of its story. Job was the greatest of all the children of the east, and his afflictions were well-nigh more than he could bear; but even if we imagined them wearing him to death, that would not make ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... when the Black Death swept England, there had lived another Guilbert who, having for consort a lovely, noble lady, they two had hand in hand devoted themselves to battling the pestilence among their serfs and retainers, and with the aid of a brother of great learning (the first Gerald of the house) had sought out and discovered such remedies as saved scores of lives and modified the sufferings of all. At the end of their labours, when the violence ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... interests of society; yet a man has but a bad grace, who delivers a theory, however true, which, he must confess, leads to a practice dangerous and pernicious. Why rake into those corners of nature which spread a nuisance all around? Why dig up the pestilence from the pit in which it is buried? The ingenuity of your researches may be admired, but your systems will be detested; and mankind will agree, if they cannot refute them, to sink them, at least, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... his crimson burnous wrapped round his towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as before a pestilence—the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of all the Spahis; brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves; all an Arab when once back in the desert; with a blow of a scabbard his only payment for forage, and a thrust of his saber ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... with an oath, when in 1628 the vessels and regiments of Richelieu closed about it on sea and land. This terrible functionary was the soul of the resistance; he held out from February to October, in the midst of pestilence and famine. The whole episode has a brilliant place among the sieges of history; it has been related a hundred times, and I may only glance at it and pass. I limit my ambition, in these light pages, to speaking of those things of which I have personally received an impression; and I have ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... those sufferings and dangers which were manifest to the whole island: And that God was angry with the Indians for being negligent in bringing provisions for our commodities, and had determined to punish them with pestilence and famine; and lest they might not believe his words, had appointed to give them a manifest token of his wrath that very night, that they might plainly know whence their punishment was derived. Wherefore the admiral ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... they were unable to dissemble their anxiety; they were too pale for that. The crowd which waited for them at the gates escorted them to their palaces in order to obtain some news from them. As in times of pestilence, all the houses were shut; the streets would fill and suddenly clear again; people ascended the Acropolis or ran to the harbour, and the Great Council deliberated every night. At last the people were convened in the square of Khamon, ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes—with a power of deposing princes, and absolving subjects from allegiance—with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven, and the beams of the sun—with the management of earthquakes, pestilence and famine.——Nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine, the flesh and blood of GOD himself.—All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people, by reducing their minds ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... There was a great deal of sickness, due to the hardships of the journey, the bad climate, irregular living, the overeating of fruit, drinking, the total lack of sanitation. In fact only the situation of the city—out on an isthmus in the sea breezes—I am convinced, saved us from pestilence. Every American seemed to possess a patent medicine of some sort with which he dosed himself religiously in and out of season. A good many, I should think, must have fallen victims ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... worth. Iniquities devastate a city like fire and pestilence. Social wealth and happiness are through right living. Goodness is a commodity. Conscience in a cashier has a cash value. If arts and industries are flowers and fruits, moralities are the roots that nourish them. Disobedience is slavery. Obedience is liberty. Disobedience to law of fire or ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... was entirely unprovided with any means of meeting this exigency. The horrible condition of the prisoners, and the crowds of half-fed whites and blacks collected in the town, bred a pestilence. Typhus or jail fever appeared in its most dreadful form, and the deaths were terribly frequent. The medical officers tried all their energies ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... vanished like things dissolving in a flood and even the priests became Protestant against celibacy and took unto themselves wives and had huge families. The natural checks upon increase, famine and pestilence, were lifted by more systematized communication and by scientific discovery; and altogether and as a consequence the world now has probably three or four times the human population it ever carried before. Everywhere in that period the family ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Wright was a famous lecturess, of the Owenite school, who was shunned like a pestilence by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... army laid siege to Henry's most valuable bit of spoils, the strong city of Metz. But the young French nobles, under Francis, Duke of Guise, a new, great general who had risen to the help of France, threw themselves gallantly into the fortress for its defence. Cold, hunger, and pestilence wasted the imperial troops until—one can scarce say they raised the siege, they disappeared, those who did not die had slunk away in fear before the grisly death. Charles accepted his fate with bitter calm, commenting that he saw Fortune ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... rank woods were full of malaria, and singular epidemics from time to time ravaged the settlements. In the autumn of 1818 the little community of Pigeon Creek was almost exterminated by a frightful pestilence called the milk-sickness, or, in the dialect of the country, "the milk-sick." It is a mysterious disease which has been the theme of endless wrangling among Western physicians, and the difficulty of ascertaining anything about it ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... of this country must at one time have been densely populated; perhaps this very density may have produced pestilence, which swept away the inhabitants. The city has been in ruins for about 600 years, and was founded about 300 years B.C. Some idea of the former extent of the Ceylon antiquities may be formed from ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... as Malthus called all those influences that are not prudential, is an ugly phrase not fully justified. It no doubt includes death through inadequate food and shelter, through pestilence from overcrowding, through war, and the like; but it also includes many causes that do not deserve so hard a name. Population decays under conditions that cannot be charged to the presence or absence of misery, in the common sense of the word. These exist when native races disappear before ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... know it if only in the one example, that the schism begat the Thirty Years' War, and the Thirty Years' War begat the Seven Years' War, and the Seven Years' War begat the Great War, which has passed like a pestilence through our own homes. After the schism Prussia could relapse into heathenry and erect an ethical system external to the whole culture of Christendom. But it can still be reasonably asked what begat the schism; and it can still be reasonably answered; something that went ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Plagues and pestilence! Why do I worry myself about her? I have quite causes enough of distraction without that. I must not turn her out of doors neither, now I remember. If I did she would fly to her friend, and would make her if possible as great a ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Schwarzenberg, with a short, peculiar laugh, "right ill things look throughout this holy German empire; poverty, war, and pestilence are the locusts of which you speak, and—But why do you remind me of these unpleasant things? Let me enjoy one quarter of an hour's refreshment and joy. Let me forget care for just a little while, and feast my eyes upon the ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... Lane Fever. People called it so, as blinking its real name, but it was not the less true that it was a very pestilence in the lower parts of Wil'sbro'; and was prostrating its victims far and wide among the gentry who had resorted to the town-hall ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... collision could not be avoided, have stood at their place to lighten, if possible, the shock, and have been killed; sea captains, who have remained at their posts till all others had left, and have gone down with their ships; physicians and nurses, and sisters of charity, who have not shrunk from pestilence in order to save life, or to comfort the dying. There was Father Damien, a Catholic priest, who so pitied the lepers that were confined to an island, deprived alike of the comforts of this world and of the consolations ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... they seen, these silent youngsters—sensitive, joyous children, whom the present day had nurtured so cleanly and so tenderly? Their bringing-up had been the complex result of so much enlightened effort. War, pestilence, famine, slaughter, were only names in a history book to them. They thought hardship was sport. A blithe summer month had plunged them into the most terrible war of the scarred old earth. The battlefields where they had mustered, stunned, but tingling with vigor ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... building, 'the result of your imbecile, idiotic, ignominious, incomprehensible policy and of your absurd "Intelligence" and "Righteousness!" Call yourselves a Parliament? I tell you, your Constitution is rotten to the core. Do you think we are to shed our blood for you, to perish of famine, sword and pestilence, while you sit here, talking the most delirious nonsense that ever was talked since the Confusion of Tongues? You never have anything fresh to say; but there you are, and nothing stops you. If it was the Day of Judgment you would go on moving ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... amongst coloured people, or go to the whites and remain with them. But to do the latter, you must bear in mind that it must never be known that you have a drop of African blood in your veins, or you would be shunned as if you were a pestilence; no matter how fair in complexion or how ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... dust. It touched the walls; it lay on the streets; it ascended to the cross on the minster's utmost top. It went down to the beggar's den. Peacefully he walked through the streets, vanished and went home. But the next morning, the pestilence was in Milan, and ere a week had sped half her population were in their graves; and half the other half, crying that hell was clutching at their hearts, fled from the reeking ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... date the cholera germ had not been clearly identified and there was some doubt regarding the means by which the disease was spread. Was sanitary neglect then as much of a sin as it would be now? May we properly say that the pestilence was a calamity visited on that city as a punishment for its sin ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... subjugation of the Goths now holding possession of Italy. His general, Belisarius, captured Rome, Dec. 10, A.D. 556. In the military operations ensuing with Vitiges, Italy was devastated, the population sank beneath the sword, pestilence, famine. In all directions the glorious remains of antiquity were destroyed; statues, as those of the Mole of Hadrian, were thrown upon the besiegers of Rome. These operations closed by the surrender of Vitiges to Belisarius at ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... at the Capital of Sweden, but at his own home. Those who say that New York is backward in giving for any commendable thing either do not know her or they belie her. Wherever in the civilized world there has been disaster by fire or flood, or from earthquake or pestilence, she has been among the foremost in the field of givers and has remained there when others have departed. It is a shame to speak of her as parsimonious or as failing in any benevolent duty. Those who charge her with being dilatory should remember that haste is not always speed. It took more than ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... seems to grasp the full significance of the satire. "We acknowledge gladly," says the reviewer, "that the author has with accuracy noted and defined the rise, development, ever-increasing contagion and plague-like prevalence of this moral pestilence; ... that the author has penetrated deep into the knowledge of this disease and its causes." He wishes for an engraving of the Sterne hobby-horse cavalcade described in the first chapter, and begs for ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... flesh. Wherever it was necessary to invoke their special aid this sort of offering was presented: for the success of crops; to insure the stability of houses and bridges[1848]; to avert or remove calamities, such as pestilence and defeat ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... cries, mingled with brutal laughter, with savage jests, with cries of "To the river!" The most cruel of cities had burst its bounds and was not to be stayed; nor would be stayed until the Seine ran red to the sea, and leagues below, in pleasant Normandy hamlets, men, for fear of the pestilence, pushed the corpses from the bridges with poles ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... to bring before you, for I have been thinking much on the matter since Amos and Julia left us. My heroes and heroines—for I have some of each sex—will now consist of those who have braved death from disease or pestilence in the path of duty. And first of all, I must go back to our old example of moral heroism—I mean, to one who has already furnished us with a lesson—John Howard. That remarkable man was not satisfied with visiting the prisons, ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... the bridal-chamber, Death! Come to the mother's, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet-song, and dance, and wine; And thou ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... thin that the ground had already begun to crack beneath the showers. The work was so badly and hastily done that before two weeks should have elapsed each of those fissures would be breathing forth pestilence. Silvine could not resist the impulse to pause at the brink of the trench and look at those pitiful corpses as they were brought forward, one after another. She was possessed by a horrible fear that in each fresh body the men brought from the cart she might ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... doubt, many have the Spanish, or as it is call'd, the French Pox, although it is common to all Nations. And it is my Opinion, there is as much Danger from such Persons, as there is from those that have the Leprosy. Tell me now, what is this short of a Pestilence? ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... been known to travel more than five or six leagues a day, or to appear simultaneously in two spots. Nothing can be more curious, than to trace out, on the maps prepared at the period in question, the slow, progressive course of this travelling pestilence, which offers to the astonished eye all the capricious incidents of a tourist's journey. Passing this way rather than that—selecting provinces in a country—towns in a province—one quarter in a town—one street in a quarter—one house in a street—having its place of residence and ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... slowly into tribes, the tribes grew slowly into nations and the nations grew slowly into worlds. New worlds became old; and other new worlds were discovered, explored, developed and made old; war and famine and pestilence and prosperity hewed and formed, carved and built and fashioned, even as wave and river and sun and wind. The kingdoms of earth, air and water yielded up their wealth as men grew strong to take it; the elements ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... any. And I praised the dead rather than the living. (Eccl. iv. 1-2.) Yes, happy are those among us who died before witnessing all these calamities, in comparison of which a typhoon, an inundation, even a pestilence, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... of things is the more extraordinary, because the great parties which formerly divided and agitated the kingdom are known to be in a manner entirely dissolved. No great external calamity has visited the nation; no pestilence or famine. We do not labor at present under any scheme of taxation new or oppressive in the quantity or in the mode. Nor are we engaged in unsuccessful war; in which, our misfortunes might easily pervert our judgment; and our minds, sore from the loss of national glory, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Saracens with an immense army came and encompassed Constantinople and for three years besieged it until, when the people had called upon God with great earnestness, many of the enemy perished from hunger and cold and by war and pestilence and so wearied out they abandoned the siege. When they had left they carried on war against the people of the Bulgarians who were beyond the Danube, but, vanquished by them also, they fled back to their ships. But when they had put out to the deep sea, a sudden storm fell upon ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... me, "What will become of the land without that beneficent god the terror of whom passed through the lands like the goddess Sekhmet in a year of pestilence?" Then I made answer unto him, saying, "His son shall save us. He hath entered the Palace, and hath taken possession of the heritage of his father. Moreover, he is the god who hath no equal, and no other can exist beside him, the lord of wisdom, perfect in his plans, of good will when ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... at him sourly. "You're in quarantine, Doc," he said. "Class I, all precautions, contact with unidentified pestilence. If you don't like it, argue with the Black Doctor, I've just got a ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... year 1848, a fatal pestilence, known by the name of "foul brood," prevailed among his bees, and destroyed nearly all his colonies before it could be subdued—only about ten having escaped the malady, which attacked alike the old stocks and his ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... in less than two months, of a pestilence, occasioned by this carnage: the air became infected, and the waters of the Loire empoisoned, by dead bodies; and those whom tyranny yet spared, perished by the elements which nature ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... pestilence, which ravaged Gwynedd or North Wales in 560. Amongst its victims was the king of the country, the celebrated Maelgwn, son ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... men of Jabesh burnt the body of Saul; and by no prohibited practice, to avoid contagion or pollution, in time of pestilence, burnt the bodies of their friends.* And when they burnt not their dead bodies, yet sometimes used great burnings near and about them, deducible from the expressions concerning Jehoram, Zedechias, and the sumptuous pyre of Asa. And ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... going?" replied Laura, opening her eyes in amazement. "Why, Dick, do you think anything but pestilence or death could keep me away? Father is going to take Belle and myself. The ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... producing it at the Opera Comique in 1846, but again he was disappointed by its falling stillborn on the public interest. Berlioz was utterly ruined, and he fled from France in the dead of winter as from a pestilence. ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... bucket of dirty water into the street. There are many things to offend the nose as well as the eyes of men of a later race. It is fortunate indeed that the Athenians are otherwise a healthy folk, or they would seem liable to perpetual pestilence; even so, great plagues have in past years harried ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... soul—they seem Like echoes of an antenatal dream. It is an isle 'twixt heaven, air, earth, and sea, Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity; Bright as that wandering Eden, Lucifer, Washed by the soft blue oceans of young air. It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight, Pestilence, War, and Earthquake, never light Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they Sail onward far upon their fatal way. The winged storms, chanting their thunder-psalm To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew, From which its ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... blood of men. In her breast they gathered, together fashioning that Cleopatra whom no man may draw, and yet whom no man, having seen, ever can forget. They fashioned her grand as the Spirit of Storm, lovely as Lightning, cruel as Pestilence, yet with a heart; and what she did is known. Woe to the world when such another comes ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... that once heard is never forgotten, all, seemingly regardless of the storm, laughing aloud or shrieking as a sudden gust whirled them on. Then the alley, dark and noisome, the tall tenement-houses rising on either side, a wall of pestilence and misery, shutting in only a little deeper misery, a little surer pestilence, to be faced as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... scenes may be, the evil is less than would result from the undisturbed decay of the dead: were that to take place, the air would hang heavy with pestilence, and the winds of heaven laden with noisome exhalations would carry death and desolation far and near, rendering still more terrible the horrors and calamities ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... about to overtake us; and, indeed, the aspect of affairs on board was sufficiently discouraging. I never, indeed, had before felt so low-spirited. The second mate predicted shipwreck; the doctor, pestilence and death. What else was to happen I could not tell. Several sharp showers fell, then suddenly the sun burst forth from behind some dark clouds with resplendent beauty, spreading over, with a sheet of silver, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... will hang upon him like a disease: he is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad. God help the noble Claudio! if he have caught the Benedick, it will cost him a thousand pound ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... Sciences." Still it had its effect, as I have every reason to believe. I cannot doubt that it has saved the lives of many young mothers by calling attention to the existence and propagation of "Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence," and laying down rules for taking the necessary precautions against it. The case has long been decided in favor of the views I advocated, but, at the time when I wrote two of the most celebrated professors of Obstetrics in this country opposed my conclusions with all the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the War she had Reconstruction to contend with; after Reconstruction, financial difficulties; after that, pestilence. In 1873, when the population of the city was about 40,000, and there had been a long period of hard times, yellow fever broke out. The condition of the city was exceedingly unsanitary, and after the pestilence had passed, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... presence, in a cabbage field beyond the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which, after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance and might become a pestilence. When we told them we meant to enter La Buissiere they held up their soiled hands ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... not believe in special providences. I believe that the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws: If one man's family is swept away by a pestilence and another man's spared it is only the law working: God is not interfering in that small matter, either against the one man or in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... with perpetual desire for more, till Prosperity strikes suddenly on an unseen rock—yet even then, by sacrificing a portion of the cargo, the rest may be saved; so by plenteous harvests sent from Zeus, hunger and pestilence may be ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... reign of Charles II. It was chosen as being well away from the town. Pennant says: "Golden Square, of dirty access, was built after the Revolution or before 1700. It was built by that true hero Lord Craven, who stayed in London during the whole time: and braved the fury of the pestilence with the same coolness as he fought the battles of his beloved mistress, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia." It was in Golden Square that De Quincey took leave of Ann, whom he ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... who survive, lying in prison for crimes, or preferring their vagabond life to the decent restraints of home. Many who do return are worse than lost to their people; coming only to spread a moral pestilence, being thoroughly demoralized; recklessly squandering their ill-gotten treasures till hunger drives them off again to beg. Happily they are now shut out of Russia by the government, and they have little hope from England. But Germany is ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... but unlike. Poverty may not be so great a bar, but moral delinquencies are more severely visited, and the family under a cloud, through the wrong-doing of one or more of its members, is treated very much as if it had a perpetual pestilence. The highly respectable keep aloof. Too often the quiet country church is not a sanctuary and place of refuge for the victims either of their own or another's sin, a place where the grasp of sympathy and words of encouragement are ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... many little children huddled themselves into corners, to teach one another to count; a people of sellers who sold nothing that was not old or damaged, and who had nothing that they would not sell; a people clothed in rags, living among rags, thriving on rags; a people strangely proof against pestilence, gathering rags from the city to their dens, when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's gates, and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly, labouring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... that arise from exposing the faults of others, and began to feel the pleasing satisfaction of universal charity. My dear children, shun the vice of scandal, and, still more, being the authors of it, as you would plague, pestilence, and famine. ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... the centaur, by the aid of melody, healed the sick, and appeased the anger of Achilles. By the same means the lyric poet Thales, who flourished in the seventh century B. C., acting by advice of an oracle, was able to subdue a pestilence in Sparta.[178:2] ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... should I. Usually at this period of the year in our country we want rain, but now we dread it like a pestilence. At any other time the Potomac could rise or fall, whenever it pleased, for all I cared, but now ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... came over his countenance. I may remark in passing, that there were on board of our ship some ten or fifteen Dutch prisoners, who were the remnant of a large force that had formerly been garrisoned at the island of Java. All but these few had been gradually wasted away by pestilence and the poisoned spears and knives of the natives; and Holland, being so much engaged in her wars at home, had no means of aiding so distant a colony. Such was their condition when the island fell into the hands of the English; and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... privy poisoning; I command Unkindly seasons, and ungrateful land. By me kings' palaces are push'd to ground. And miners crush'd beneath their mines are found. 'Twas I slew Samson, when the pillar'd hall Fell down, and crush'd the many with the fall. My looking is the sire of pestilence, That sweeps at once the people and the prince. Now weep no more, but trust thy grandsire's art, 420 Mars shall be pleased, and thou perform thy part. 'Tis ill, though different your complexions are, The family of heaven for men should war. The expedient pleased, where neither ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... in this year there was a notable pestilence in our House of the Blessed Virgin in the Wood, whereof the Prior and many Brothers died, and the one priest who survived, Brother John of Groninghen, a weakly and feeble man, was left desolate save for the presence ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... recover from such calamities as famine, war, and pestilence with surprising quickness; but there were certain incidents connected with the famine of 1846-47 that intensified and perpetuated the evil in the case of Ireland. We have already referred to the high-and-dry doctrines of laissez faire then in the ascendant, and ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... the most interestin' things in the hull buildin' wuz the exhibit of the Beneficent Societies formed by wimmen all over the world—what they have done in war, pestilence, and famine, what they have done in wrestlin' with that deadly serpent, whose folds encompass the earth—the foulest serpent of Intemperance. What my sect have done banded together to promote liberty, to establish religion, ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... avoid adopting its worst American abuses. But it will do no harm if Englishmen in general recognise that what is, it is to be hoped, still far from inevitable, was a short time ago impossible. If Great Britain must admit an influence which has, even though only incidentally, bred pestilence and corruption elsewhere, it might be well to take in time whatever sanitary and preventive measures may be ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... to say that there are some wars which are not all evil. They are terrible, but terrible like the hurricane, which sweeps away the pestilence; terrible like the earthquake, on whose night of terror God builds a thousand years of blooming plenty; terrible like the volcano, whose ashes are clothed by the purple vintages and yellow harvests of a hundred generations. The strong ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in Zola's story she has first been disabled by the attack of her enemies and then destroyed by the defence of her friends. Three times the armies of the belligerents have rolled over her, and now that they are gone she lies stricken afresh, even yet more fiercely, under the famine and pestilence which have stalked ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... is not necessarily supernatural. Sacred Scripture and the Fathers sometimes apply the word to purely natural gifts. We petition God for our daily bread, for good health, fair weather and other temporal favors, and we thank Him for preserving us from pestilence, famine, and war, although these are blessings which do not transcend ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... rivers to change their courses, destroyed towns, and was followed by the outbreak of a disastrous epidemic. The chiefs were obliged to give up their plans, although in healthy Tampu-tocco there was no pestilence. Their kingdom became more and more crowded. Every available square yard of arable land was terraced and cultivated. The men were intelligent, well organized, and accustomed to discipline, but they could not raise enough food ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... and politeness never introduce into mixed society a question on which they foresee there will be a difference of opinion.) From both of those classes of disputants, my dear Jefferson, keep aloof, as you would from the infected subjects of yellow fever or pestilence. Consider yourself, when with them, as among the patients of Bedlam, needing medical more than moral counsel. Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially on politics. In the fevered state of our country, no good ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... she must suffer here to expiate the fate of Dr. Grimshaw, who, scorpion-like, stung himself to death with the venom of his own bad passions. She is a Sister of Mercy, devoted to good works, and leaves her convent only in times of war, plague, pestilence or famine, to minister to the suffering. She nursed me through the yellow fever, when I lay in the hospital at New Orleans, but when I got well enough to recognize her she vanished—evaporated—made herself 'thin air,' and another Sister served in ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Castille in the year 1514, along with Pedro Arias de Avila, then appointed to the government of Tierra Firma, and arrived with him at Nombre de Dios. A pestilence raged in the colony at our arrival, of which many of the soldiers died, and most of the survivors were invalids. De Avila gave his daughter in marriage to a gentleman named Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who had conquered that province; but ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... sad sight of the countless burials that took place in the year of the Plague, 1349, when fifty thousand were interred in the burial ground of the Carthusians, and few dared to attend the fair for fear of the pestilence. ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... sand, the hole it left filled with bitter black ooze. There, sunk in the ooze, covered with the shifting sand, bewailed by the wild cries of sea-birds, noteless and alone, I left Eben Jackson, and returned to the mass of pestilence and wretchedness within the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... somewhat hard upon him, since the other gods agreed to his proposal. But eventually a reconciliation takes place; the great bow of Anu is displayed in the heavens; Bel agrees that he will be satisfied with what war, pestilence, famine, and wild beasts can do in the way of destroying men; and that, henceforward, he will not have recourse to extraordinary measures. Finally, it is Bel himself who, by way of making amends, transports Hasisadra, his wife, and ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... is: "Patron of the work of the laborers and their livestock; wonderful antidote against pestilence; universal refuge for the cure of all diseases and pains; singular protector of the women who invoke him in their dangerous hours of giving birth, and of the sterile ones who seek the comfort of his protection." This is what is said in the frontispiece of his novena, Manila 1918. "By ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... win men's hate. We have seen the private suffering of the day, but nationally too England was racked with despair and the sense of wrong; with the collapse of the French war, with the ruinous taxation, with the frightful pestilence that had swept away half the population; with the iniquitous labour-laws that, in the face of such a reduction, kept down the rate of wages in the interest of the landlords; with the frightful law of settlement ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... was not the case with the Club Indians of the Colorado of the West, with the Crows, the Flat-heads, the Umbiquas, and the Black-feet. These last suffered a great deal more than any people in the world ever suffered from any plague or pestilence. To be sure, the Mandans had been entirely swept from the surface of the earth; but they were few, while the Black-feet were undoubtedly the most numerous and powerful tribe in the neighbourhood of the mountains. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... Babylonian Pluto, particularly in the religious texts, his functions are not limited to the control of the dead. He is the personification of some of the evils that bring death to mankind, particularly pestilence and war. The death that follows in his path is a violent one, and his destructive force is one that acts upon large masses rather than upon the individual. Hence, one of the most common ideographs used to express his name is ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... pestilence among us," she declared, her foot tapping the ground angrily, "and the least we can do is to go into quarantine. Oh, I'm so sorry and so ashamed! The poor bishop! I'll take good care that no one else shall meet that woman here. You ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... civilization. To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence following upon crowded and unsanitary dwellings was the loss of spiritual power inseparable from too close contact with one's fellow-men. All who have lived much out of doors know that there is a magnetic and nervous force that accumulates in solitude and that is quickly dissipated ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... consisted of an aristocracy, a fortunate few, who were continually at strife with one another to gain supremacy of power, or an acquisition of territory. Wars, famine and pestilence were of frequent occurrence. Of the subjects, male and female, some had everything to render life a pleasure, while others had nothing. Poverty, oppression and wretchedness was the lot of the many. Power, wealth and luxury the dower ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... season of blackwater fever, the pestilence that stalks in the noontide and the terror of tropical campaigning. Hitherto with the exception of the Rhodesians who have had this disease previously in their northern territory, or men who have come from the Congo or the shores of the Great Lakes, our army has been fairly free from ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... and boats. Woe to those who allow themselves to be tempted on board by the magnificence of its decorations! How great is their chance of infection, how easily they will carry it from ship to ship, and from the ships on to the shore, till the pestilence has spread from the harbor to the city! Let us then be thankful to those who destroy the gorgeous vessel, who drive it from amongst us, or sink or burn it. May our Father in Heaven give courage to their hearts, strength to their hands and blessing on their deeds! When we hear: 'Great Serapis has ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fancy-balls—'Of course,' he said, 'if I went to one, I should go as a Dissenter.' Of Macaulay, he said, 'To take him out of literature and science, and to put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London in a pestilence.' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... No pestilence like a serpent, with dread envenomed fangs Has seized the young and beautiful and filled our souls with pangs. Then why has gloom profound so settled on each face, And the finger-prints of sorrow left on us so ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... but the ardency of the sun grew greater, and the Hermit's cliff was a fiery furnace. Never had such heat been known in those regions; but the people did not murmur, for with the cessation of the rain their crops were saved and the pestilence banished; and these mercies they ascribed in great part to the prayers and macerations of the two holy anchorets. Therefore on the eve of the Assumption they sent a messenger to the Hermit, saying that at daylight on the morrow the townspeople and all ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Misericordia, whereof we have spoken above, had acquired great wealth by means of bequests made by diverse persons in the city through the devotion that they felt for that holy place and for its brethren, who attend to the sick and bury the dead in every pestilence, without fear of any peril; and that therefore they wished to make a facade for that place, but in grey-stone, for lack of a supply of marble. This work, which had been begun before in the German style, he undertook to do; and assisted by many stonecutters ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... arrest the progress of the pestilence in the people's food have occupied the attention of scientific men. The commission appointed by government, consisting of three of the most celebrated practical chemists, has published a preliminary report, in which several ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... die of want, sent wheat. Then came the cholera from all four quarters of the compass. It struck a pilgrim-gathering of half a million at a sacred shrine. Many died at the feet of their god; the others broke and ran over the face of the land carrying the pestilence with them. It smote a walled city and killed two hundred a day. The people crowded the trains, hanging on to the footboards and squatting on the roofs of the carriages, and the cholera followed them, for at each station they dragged out ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... men in wild terror begin to call upon the God they have forgotten and abused, then go thou forth in the power of that purity of heart which He in His mercy has vouchsafed to thee. Fear not the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor the sickness that destroyeth at noonday. A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. With thine eyes shalt thou behold the destruction of thine enemies; but the angels of God shall ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... unfinished, as is the case so often with lads at school. Outwardly I was attractive; and the old woman, who had married two husbands merely for their looks, delighted in feeling that she had the power to retain me by her side at an age when most boys avoid old people as if they were the pestilence. ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens |
